DEBATE BETWEEN TERRY EASTWOOD AND THEO THOMASSEN
On the 15"' and 16lh of March, 2007, in the city of Rio de Janeiro, the Brazilian Archivists Society promoted the II Meeling ofArchival Information Data Bases. All the conferences are already published. However, we witnessed a very interesting debate held on the 16"'. In a plenary session hosted by Professor Maria Odila Kahl Fonseca, Professors Terry Eastwood and Theo Thomassen answered the questions formulated by the audience and offered us a scientific debate of most relevance for Archival Science.
Terry Eastwood is a professor emeritus of the School of Library, Archival and Information Studies from the University of British Columbia and Theo Thomassen is the director of the Reinwardt Academy, Faculty of Museology of the Amesterdam School for the Arts.
Maria Odila Fonseca, president of the plenary session, and professor at the Fluminense Federal University:
Well, we shall begin the debate and I would like to ask the audience to make use of the available microphone to pose the questions or to make comments.
Lucia Maria Velloso de Oliveira, head of the Historical and Institutional Archival Service of the Rui Barbosa's House Foundation:
Professor Terry Eastwood, I would like you to make a comment about the position of Professor Theo Thomassen concerning the caution we must have because of the possible “freezing” that the standardization of the Archival Description could lead us.
Terry Eastwood:
What was your worry again, what was your concem about standardization? Theo Thomassen:
1 said that standardization should not be a goal in itself, that standardization is a kind of interpretation and maybe we should problematize standardization instead of promoting it and see it merely as a nece^ary tool.
Terry Eastwood:
way I would look at it, I can perhaps present this quite simply. Let us take the business that some of these critics have said that you should declare yourself, who you are, vvhen you are describing things in the descriptive instruments and perhaps something about the perspective that you may be taking and the purposes which you are trying to achieve so that would mean that the descriptive standard would have to have an element in it that would allow the archivist to put that information in an appropriate place. Quite frankly, 1 think there has been a big misunderstanding about these standards. That is what the standards help you do. They help you identify the various categories of information and eive you some guidance on how you can formulate the content that you put in there. What they do not say anything about is how you present this material to users. Now, I think we are finding from the kinds of things that Theo showed us that it might be better to show things to genealogists in quite a different way. They obviously do not want to work their way through a traditional inventory. It does not work for them. And interestingly, what they do the world over is they get involved. In Canada, in many archives, genealogists have come in and actually produced the nominal indexes to a series of records so that every genealogist could quickly and efficiently find the things that they wanted because archivists just did not have the time to do that. Too many archivists have assumed that all they need to do is produce this one description in the standard way, present it in this way that might not be compatible for users; that is the iast thing that should happen. These standards are behind the scene. They are just assisting archivists to identify the information, and they can expand the real of that information that we want to record. I do not think 1 disagree with Theo on this, do you think I do?
Theo Thomassen:
Well, in my opinion a standard is also a kind of model. We need models to understand the world. A model is a way of looking at things so a model helps us to see things and other things we do not see because we use that model. You described the history of archive arrangement and description. The Dutch Manual is such a model, it is such a standard and it is very interesting to see how it is reinterpreting older archives not because it formulated the principies of Provenance on the levei of the archives and original order on the levei of the file, but it advocated the application of a natural classification. And the natural classification was, in the opinion of the authors of the manual, a representation of how the old organizations should have been, should have looked like. So, they applied this methodology, this model and this standard to ancient regime archives in the Netherlands and these archives were not arranged according to a natural classification at all. They were arranged according to form of material. Regulations, incoming and, outgoing letters
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etc..etc.. And now these archives have changed. They look different than they did before. What is the problem then? Well, this is a part of my thesis, so it takes more time for me to explain it! In the 19"’ Century, archivists had processed these archives and they did this with the model of the State Organization of lhe 19lh Century on the their minds, that is, centralized governments. And in designing a natural classification they took the ideas of this kind of government organizations and applied it to the archives. So now, many of the ancient regime archives in the Netherlands are quite similar to 19‘h Century archives and history built on these archives reflects how a 19lh Century government organization was. That is one line. The other line about standards is that standards are necessary, we need standards like we need models but it is very dangerous to apply them. You must be very criticai about them, therefore I use the word “problematize”. It is a new word from my own dissertation and my dissertation is not finished yet and that is exactly the reason why. Because my specialization is the archives of the Dutch Estates General during the period of 1576 to 1795. It is twelve hundred meters of archives mirroring the Dutch Republic data in that time in the whoie wide world. It was still organized according to form of material and not very accessible to the users, so what I tried to do was apply the methods of functional analysis to the Estates-General and identify missions, goals, functions, styles, activilies etc....and then link activities to records, and I had already made a data model. We had a database, I fed the data base with all the information and 1 could see that it was possible to do it, to create such a data base and make it accessible to users in that way. And then I decided to stop the whoie project: It had taken me almost 3 to 4 years; but I understood that what I was doing was changing the whoie Estates- General. Because when researching the structure, I increasingly discovered that it asked for another approach than archives of the 19"' Century. You cannot distinguish functions, tasks, etc...in this body in terms of parents/children relations. The Estates-General was a representative body acting as a sovereign body at the same time. But they did it in different regions in different ways, so a function is linked to Mandate A in Region A and Mandate B in Region C. When you are standardizing that, or let us put it another way: its most characteristic feature was that it was not standardized and they themselves did not always know how to organize things in different regions. There was an army of lawyers disputing who had the privilcgc of doing this or doing that. So, I think, to conclude, (I discussed it with Michael Fox1 yesterday, maybe we can ask him in the afternoon) that maybe it is not very wise to apply standards like EAD or ISAD, which are applicable to
1
Michael Fox is lhe deputy director of lhe Minnesota Historical Society and during the event conducted the course: Why EAD and EAC: the case for standardized electronic management of archival information.
contemporary, to archives from earlier times which originally do not have this parents/ children structure. Do you agree with me?
Terry Lastwood:
And again what Stefano Vitali lias said, of course, is that everything depends upon the history of the body that created the archives and the history of the body of records that it produced. OI course, I think this is a difficult problem of archival Science. I gather that a lot oí people here have read Michel Duchein's famous article on respect des fonds, and ultimately if you are to be a historian of the record you cannot just simply assume that what is before you now was exactly what was generated by the body that generated it many years ago. Much could have happened. We can only describe, or document or provide information about that which we reliably know or sources which teliably tell us, but to the extern that we know about these things. So, the questions of identifying what would constitute a series of records and what was its real context of creation. It seems to me, although I did not study its history, it seems only logical that the first thing one would do if one was going to use the archives of the Estates-General that you are talking about is to understand fairly well what was the Estates-General and how it operated and what purpose did it have. Was it largely a legislative body or did it have a legislative and judicial function, and then see what it did and try to see how, if at all, these functions were reflected in the records. They might not be reflected at all, because much early record keeping was done strictly on the basis of form. An incoming document would be filed separately from an outgoing document and if they were minutes they were filed somewhere else and so on and so forth. And that is fine, so it is very subtle, but the obligation, is to be faithful to the records and their context, this is the difficulty. The world that Theo was talking about is important and I support almost all you said about paying attention to the users, becoming involved with the users. Archives need to be more popular institutions than they are, many more people can derive great enjoyment and benefit from knowing and using archives than they do. And this is only going to grow in an increasingly literate society and maybe in a society where people would be more concerned about their roots and their past, I do not know, I think that is visible the world over. So, there needs to be that support there, but I think that this argument tha. I revealed was about those two things. On the one hand, you are trying to do that, but on the other hand, you see this traditional purpose that description should be explicating. It is not the meaning of the individual records, in some ways, because we cannot really ascribe all the meaning that could be given to
job, and I think the standards help and yes, they should not be made into a panacea. They are particular models lhat might have their limitations and so should constantly be subjected to criticai scrutiny and should be not thought of as a straightjacket. You should never think of your standard as a straightjacket, indeed. But as 1 said, 1 think a lot of times the critics of standards did not spend any time describing archives. Some of them have not spent any time ever in their lives describing archives but they take the interpreter’s view and they know they know better and they tell archivists that their standards are faulty and 1 get very mad at them!
Theo Thomassen:
Now \ve must agree Terry! What I actually did was try to apply these standards to the archives, that was lhe starting point. 1 would like to comment on what you said about historical work. I agree with most of what you said, of course, we are standing in the same tradition, but it is a matter of how you look at it. This historical research, in order to represent a context of an archive is of course, an act of interpretation. And the more you research on this, the record creator, the more you are interpreting the archive; that is one thing. Secondly, my objection or my criticism on the application of descriptive standards (and of course you cannot do wilhout them, I know that) - but my criticism is that implicitly or explicitly they are used not to describe records as such, but to make them understandable. And 1 would look for what is not understandable in archives, particularly in archives of other cultures or other times. Because Foucault has said, and I agree with him, lhat the most characteristic feature of a culture is in its way of arrangement. So, if a culture is very different from your own, you do not understand the way of arrangement, so you should keep lhat, because this arrangement lhat you do not understand is what you must preserve and it will give the historian or the researchcr the reason to research on them. I do not know if the same procedures are followed in other countries, but in my country, in all inventories, in the traditional ones, you read in the introduction: “Of course 1 had to resort the original order but there was no order at all visible, so I did it in my way.”
Terry Eastwood:
Yes, 1 think that is bad but 1 also think that you are just getting down to what is at lhe core of this and that is why this is bothersome to people outside of archives, and they sometimes think this is all very scholastic. That is why my colleague and another former student, Robert Krawcyck, said that we love these descriptive standards that we are applying but we do not have the agreed upon standards for identification or arrangement
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and that is exactly what you are saying. I agree with you that it is an absolute must for the archivist (and 1 thought that this was always part of the best standard theory at least), that you do not disturh that which you do not understand.
Theo Thomassen: We agree, Terry! Terry Eastwood:
That is a dictum of the work. But you see. It is very interesting because that is what it is saying: that your prime responsibility is to make sure that you can somehow communicate these archives with the least possible, because there is always going to be some, clouding of the picture, obscuring of the picture. It is no easy matter to communicate something, to carry something forward from the time of the Dutch Republic or quite frankly, 19,h Century Brazil. And people will come at it not understanding a lot.
Unidentified Partieipant:
It will be interesting to amplify the effort and dedication for the context matter. The rules must be determined respecting the specificities. These rules are quite wide open and allow different possibilities of completion of the work in the specific descriptions that we are already discussing. And the idea is exactly to build an informative that helps us to rebuild and specify the context in which the records are produced.
Terry Eastwood
I am glad that this last speaker touched on this question of context, which of course is extremely difficult and as Theo points out, the more you try to explicate, explain past historical context, the more you become an interpreter. So, it is a difficult area but it is right to record it. It is often neglected, the description of context. So, I think we have to work carefully, I think we also have to be careful about the language of functions, activities, mandates, these are all modem terms and we have to be careful in historical terms. But I think the most important thing is that almost all of this thinking and the efforts of archivists worldwide, I would like to say they have retumed, in some ways, to a concentration on context, which is very interesting because in my country the interesting thing was that in the early days of archives, before there was archival education, who do you think was hired by archives in Canada? What was their training? What kind of people worked in archives? Historians, yes! People who had history training! So, a lot of those people, when archival education first carne along said, “you are losing the
historical dimension, you are becoming Information managers”. They had all kmds of worries that archival education would somehow be scholastic or it would be swallowed up by librarianship or library Science and I think one of the ways in which th.s historical orientation of archives is addressed is that we are more concerned about mstructmg students about the difficulties of interpretation that an archivist faces. When you appra.se records, when you describe records, yes, there is no neutral position. 1 mean, it is a straw man argument to accuse archivists of a naíve belief in their objectivity. No sensible human being would ever say that the archivist was a neutral person. But that does not mean that your responsibility is not to do what Theo wants to be done with the Estate’s archives, not to disturb it, but somehow explain it well enough so anybody approach.ng it is not misled. You cannot tell them everything, but you at least do not mislead them about the situation. And that means some sophisticated and sensitive description of context, which is something archivists have to do. And it will help if the standards can help also frame what that area is and then articles will be written and people will talk about it and they will flesh out or amplify what the meaning is. So, these things, 1 think, are all very healthy and 1 like to think that archivists in a descriptive work inevitably do become a specics of historiam there is no doubt about that. But a very special species of historian with a very special purpose and a very special message that is all their own, and that is what makes for the archival Science of it.
Maria Odila Fonseca, president of the plenary session, and professor at the Fluminense Federal University:
We have another person who wants to make a question. Unidentified Participant:
In what way the linguistics could help on the building of a documentary language and the recovery of information?
Theo Thomassen:
We can look at what you saw in the Tilburg website. There you can start with a free search in the data bases and if you find a document, you find the context with the document. So, you start with the specific and you go to the more complex. You can also do the oppos.te and search on the basis of institutional context and go from the general to the specific - And there is a method in between and that is the method of controlled vocabulanes. It is a combination of this free search and the more contextualized way ot searchmg. So, as for your first question, 1 think all melhods of searching are helpful. We now have
possibilities of combining them and let the user choose and get lost in his or her own way. And as for your question about whether interdisciplinarity in linguistics would help or not, I am very positive about it. Yes, it was actually in linguistics where post-modernism was bom more or less. You can see record keeping as storytelling; all of these notions are based on linguistic notions, I think. So, it would be very interesting to investigate to what extent archival Science could benefit from linguistics.
Terry Eastwood:
I am also very positive. We have had a number of students come to us with a linguistic background and they have come up with very interesting things as students and also once they become graduates. Robert Krawcyck, who built the Series System of Control in the Ontario Archives in Toronto, Canada, had a linguistics background and has written very well about these issues in volume 48 of Archivaria. 1 am also very much of the opinion that work in an interdisciplinary way is necessary. There is archival science, but a lot of what Theo’s demonstration was about raises interesting questions about human/computer interaction and building ways that suit people and also suit the nature of that environment. They have obviously done some very clever things in terms of their work: They connect with the user groups; they have been able to capitalize on people’s enthusiasm, archivists are getting involved. This is exactly what this environment encourages and develops and I think all to the benefit of the archival institution because it becomes less impenetrable. Most people think of archives as this impenetrable place, that you cannot pierce, you cannot understand, they cannot see anything, you walk in there in and all you see is finding aids, which they do not understand, and it is hard to find anything. But this is all new to websites, so working with others who are experts in other areas I think can be very fruitful in terms of education. In these past twenty-six years of my teaching archival science, I have struggled to develop better understanding on the part of my students of the new technology, and it has not been easy in my University to get much help from other departments, they were busy teaching their own students so you have to work hard to draw on this knowledge. Well, if you send them out to take a course, they come back and say, there was no connection made with what I am interested in and you say: “You have to make the connections yourselves, but of course it does not always work. So, it is a difficult issue but an important one.”
Maria Odila Fonseca, president of the plenary session, and professor at the Fluminense Federal University':
Well, since there are no more questions, \vc are going to end this mornmg’s plenary session, and I think it is important that we highlight the excellence and the interest on both the conference and the debate. I think that we, from the Brazilian Archivists Society are to be congratulated for lhe organization of lhe event. We are having here a deep and unique opportunity to update ourselves and to also realize that we are ín Brazil and following an international agenda. That, for us, is very important since our academic visibility is small, even inside governmental area. But I think that events like this show us lhai we are heading the right way, and that we already have a criticai mass, even enough for us to make the right invitations and set up these events. This demonstrates that we are, let’s say, up-to-date with te matters of scientific archeology.
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DEBATE ENTRE TERRY EASTWOOD E THEO THOMASSEN
Nos dias 15 e 16 de março de 2007 a Associação dos Arquivistas Brasileiros promoveu na cidade do Rio de Janeiro ,o II Encontro de Bases de Dados sobre Informações Arquivisíicas. No dia 16 de março, em plenária presidida pela professora Maria Odila Kahl Fonseca, os professores Terry Eastwood e Theo Thomassen responderam às questões encaminhadas pela platéia e nos ofereceram um debate científico da maior relevância para Arquivologia.
Terry Eastwood é professor emérito da School of Library, Archival and Information Studies, University of British Columbia, Canadá e Theo Thomassen é o diretor da Reinwardt Academy, Faculty of Museology of the Amesterdam School for the Arts, Holanda.
Maria Odila Kahl Fonseca, presidente da sessão plenária, professora da Universidade Federal Fluminense:
Bom, temos tempo para o debate e eu gostaria de solicitar aos que desejarem fazer alguma pergunta ou comentário, por favor, que se dirija ao microfone.
Lucia Maria Velloso de Oliveira, chefe do Serviço de Arquivo Histórico e Institucional da Fundação Casa de Rui Barbosa:
Professor Terry Eastwood, gostaria que o senhor comentasse a posição do professor Theo Thomassen quanto ao cuidado que devemos ter em relação à possibilidade de “engessamento” que a padronização da descrição arquivística possa nos conduzir. Terry Eastwood:
Qual era a sua preocupação mesmo? Qual era o seu receio em relação à padronização? Theo Thomassen:
Eu disse que a padronização não deveria ser um objetivo em si, que a padronização é um tipo de interpretação e talvez nós deveriamos “problematizar’ a padronização, ao invés de promovê-la e vê-la meramente como uma ferramenta necessária.
Terry Eastwood:
Sim, certamente, é um meio e é uma das metodologias dominantes. Acho que posso apresentar o modo pelo qual eu olharia isso de maneira bem simples. Vamos pegar,
